Is Rihanna's vitamin drip more than just a celebrity health fad?

It almost makes you nostalgic for the days when celebrities did nothing weirder in the pursuit of long life and ravishing looks than pay someone to do something unpleasant with a bucket of water and a hosepipe. Remember Gwyneth Paltrow and her cupping? Keanu Reeves sleeping in an oxygen tent? So quaint!

While wacky stories occasionally surface – in 2008 it was reported that Madonna smothers herself in anti-ageing cream before going to bed in a plastic suit – the job of helping celebrities feel better about themselves has just got a whole lot more extreme. Last month, Rihanna tweeted a picture of herself hooked up to an IV drip, and it has now emerged that she hadn't been admitted to hospital, but was the latest celebrity to have had a high-dose cocktail of vitamins drip-fed into the bloodstream, a procedure that is claimed, among other things, to cure exhaustion and boost the immune system.

Psychiatrists say it's the placebo effect, while some nutritionists warn that high doses of vitamins could be toxic, but this doesn't appear to put people off. One London clinic that has been offering them since 2010, for £225 a pop, says they are becoming more popular. "People come in after a night out and have the drip," Maria Hazuchova at EF Medispa told the Evening Standard. "It's a quicker fix; some people might have to work afterwards and just want to feel better."

Simon Cowell, a man who – with his suitcases full of potions and portable oxygen tank – is starting to make Michael Jackson look like a fan of peer-reviewed medical procedures, is also said to be a regular vitamin-drip receiver. "Even when I'm having a viewing session with producers, [a nurse] just sticks the needle in me and we carry on whatever we are doing," he told the US edition of GQ last year, bringing to mind not so much the image of a top executive with all the modern medical miracles at his fingertips, but Smithers attending to a mortality-cheating Mr Burns in The Simpsons.